IT blunder drained hospital of £10m for key equipment

One of London's busiest hospitals ran out of money to pay for new medical equipment because it spent so much on the botched NHS IT scheme, its boss admitted today.

The Royal Free hospital lost £10 million as a result of bringing in a computerised medical records system, chief executive Andrew Way said.

It meant the hospital was forced to employ 40 new administrative staff to deal with the delays and extra work created by the software, instead of spending cash on medical equipment such as new x-ray machines.

The Royal Free in Hampstead was one of the first hospitals to use the medical records system - part of a national £12 billion IT upgrade that aims to put 50 million patient records on one database by 2014.

But the system has been plagued with problems and caused much frustration behind the scenes amongst medical staff.

Mr Way said he has formally apologised to his staff for bringing in the new system before he was clear what the implications would be.

He said: "I have had more doctors and nurses talk to me about how terrible they feel providing such a poor service to their patients over the last six months than I have over my whole career in the NHS."

He said the system, which was brought in at the Royal Free last summer, kept crashing and also prevented the hospital from billing other parts of the NHS for services, creating a gap in the hospital's budget of £10 million.

The problems in the system were first revealed by the Evening Standard last summer.

It is now working, but still takes staff four times as long to book an outpatient appointment as it did before the system was introduced.

Mr Way said the hospital had to spend £4 million more on the system than they anticipated, and lost £6million in income "because we haven't got enough detail in the system to bill Primary Care Trusts for the activity we have undertaken or because we weren't able to get patients in front of doctors and nurses".

He said individual hospitals should be able to tailor the system to their needs, rather than having a one-size-fits-all system imposed on them.

The experience of the Royal Free has been watched closely by health bosses and is crucial to the roll-out of the system nationwide.

It is unusual for an NHS manager to speak out in this way, but reflects the growing frustration amongst staff with the new system.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "Many elements of the programme are complete, and patients and clinicians are now beginning to see the benefits these systems bring to improve patient care.

"We are learning lessons from the deployment at the Royal Free of Cerner Millennium, which now has an effective patient record system, and we expect these lessons to help us improve further deployments."